openSUSE 11.4 has been released

In case you hadn’t heard, openSUSE 11.4 was released this Thursday, and as usual opensuse-guide.org was updated at the same time.

I think overall it’s a very good release, besides being the first major distribution to ship KDE SC 4.6, LibreOffice Linux 2.6.37 with free Broadcom wlan drivers (for some recent chips) and other goodies.

You can read the announcement here or read the Product highlights for a more extensive presentation of the new stuff.

As customary I like to also prepare people for the most likely causes of problems:

PulseAudio is now installed and enabled in KDE installations by default. If it’s causing sound problems, you can disable it in YaST -> Sound -> Other -> PulseAudio Configuration (or run ‘setup-pulseaudio –disable’) or even uninstall it – KDE doesn’t have hard dependencies on it.

GStreamer is the new default Phonon backend – enough said. You may want to use phonon-backend-xine or phonon-backend-vlc (from Packman) instead, if Amarok or other Phonon applications misbehave.

The great new KDE Bluetooth tool – BlueDevil – has a missing dependency on obexd-client, which means you’ll need to install obexd-client yourself in order for sending files via Bluetooth to work.

The NetworkManager plasmoid is not perfect. An online update should be along soon improving it significantly. If it’s causing problems you can easily install and use nm-applet (NetworkManager-gnome) instead – with the new oxygen-gtk theme it doesn’t even look bad 😉